Sixteen-year-old Miya Trigg is like any typical teenager, where playing softball and hanging out with her friends is what she lives to do. However, over the past year, her life has been anything but typical.
“I was getting really, really bad headaches,” Trigg said. “To where like I could take Tylenol and it wouldn’t stop.”
After several tests and scans, doctors at Atrium Health determined Trigg had a cancerous tumor at the base of her brain.
“Medulloblastoma. It’s basically a tumor that is very fast growing, and in some cases it’s aggressive,” Trigg explained.
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And because it was located in such a critical part of Trigg’s brain, it required special equipment that Atrium Health did not have. That equipment delivers pinpoint radiation called proton beam therapy.
So Trigg ended up spending several months at a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida.
“It kind of pulled me away from my dad and my brother. It was kind of tough on my mom to be so far from them,” Trigg elaborated. “If there was a proton beam here, it would be so much more helpful for me and my parents.”